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Thursday, October 26, 2006

Norm Dicks answers the call

Congressman Norm Dicks of the 6th CD responded positively to the calls that folks made to ask him to contribute money from his campaign chest to Democrats running in more competitive districts. He donated $100,000 + according to Chris Bowers, reporting back on his "Use It or Lose It" program. This was on top of the nearly $600,000 that he raised yesterday for the DCCC from the lunch he hosted downtown for Al Gore. Also today, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy each donated $500,000 to the DSCC. This program is working. We may not get the entire $15 million we are looking for but it will be close.

I feel like I and our readers here had an impact on Dicks' decision, along with a bunch of folks from MoveOn.org. I called Dicks' Tacoma office on Friday afternoon and then wrote up a post asking others to do the same. I repeated the plea yesterday. Then I called the Tacoma office again today to ask them how it was going. As soon as I called, they laughed and asked if I was calling about the program. I said I was. The man who answered the phone asked me if I knew that Dicks had already given a lot to candidates. I told him I did and appreciated it. He asked if I knew about the lunch yesterday and how much had been raised. Yes. I said that perhaps they might want to write to Chris Bowers and talk about getting credit for what they'd done. I gave them Chris' email address and said I'd write about it as soon as I saw the results on Chris' list.